ABSTRACT

Freud's encounter with the soldiers who returned from the trenches of the First World War generated several studies he published in 1919-1920. For Freud, and for Jacques Lacan who followed in his footsteps, the death drive is not an individual's wish for annihilation but the repetition of a traumatic event in varying permutations. The operation of the death drive as repetition makes each and every life trajectory not only singular but winding, meandering as it repeats, and as such, longer than what would have been the direct progression of the biological organism from birth to death. The deconstruction of death into its real and symbolic components allows Lacan to situate death as a necessary condition for the creation of art and as cause of art's effects. A visual artwork or a literary text includes a dimension supplementary to sense, image or content.